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Questions to be answered include the advantages to animatic storyboards and DV video cameras also the advances to CGI and the benefits and downfalls.

Having used Animatic storyboards, I know that they are useful to the director to create as it gives an initial feel to how the film or even scenes will play out as animatic storyboards are moving image storyboards which reveal scenes as they will in the film, drawing characters and their movements (not usually completely fluid animation however) and this is often now done on a computer using a drawing tablet and Photoshop in order to create the film and this then allows the creator to export and see how long the scenes are but also showing which angles to use and the length of the soundtrack that needs to be made. A good example is seen here with Despicable Me 2 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHrguUH1qz4) and it depicts the uses of lighting and character & camera movements.

THEDIGITALAGE

Examples of the best films that have blown their audience away with the advances in CGI. Examples include The Matrix (top), Avatar (bottom left) and Inception (bottom right).

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In my view therefore, they are extremely useful for numerous reasons and show a preliminary film before complete production begins and outlines any potential problems at the early stages possible and not only animated films such as Despicable Me use them, I found examples for Iron Man and for scenes that never made it to the final cut of the Lord of the Rings trilogy as pictured to the left hand side.

Overall, they have many advantages over your traditional storyboard and show how a film will play out and are particularly useful with animation films and thus Pixar and Disney use them frequently.

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CGIAdvantages and Disadvantages.

CGI has come a long way and they have clearly made a significant impact upon mainstream movies and the box office and allows people as the audience to enjoy historic events such as in Gladiator. With modern day productions, the use of visual effects means that less physical work is put into it and even so the current state of CGI allows the audience to really feel immersed into a film because of the believable CGI (e.g. Life of Pi).

However various cons have been pointed out and they include the fact that they are simply becoming overused in big budget hollywood movies and now have begun to lose their special effect on us audience, pardon the pun. An example of this would be The Hobbit or Spider-man.

Some may go to the extent of arguing that it is just laziness for a film-maker to use CGI and begins to give the film a feel of a cartoon as the best films are drive completely by the story (physically), for example Shawshank Redemption which used no special effects and remains number 1 on IMDb’s ‘Top 250’.

DV Cameras?What are their Advantage?

DV came around in 1995 and offered the first format at storing digital video and since then there has been vast improvement but most notably their advantages made a mockery over traditional film.

The first thing to clearly note is the improvement in the video quality, high definition digital video cameras came around and are now fast becoming the preferred choice over film and this is because of the high speed film quality offered and that when dealing with negatives it is often found to be a pain because of the poor colours that come as the outcome.

Another advantage is that film of course has many limitations when in comparison with digital video such as the potential bad development leading to bad quality video and also the much easier ability to import, upload and edit footage with digital media.

A fairly obvious but very useful one is the storage space, for example when storing film you would require a lot of space, this in comparison with a small thumb drive or hard drive is comparatively nothing. Further on storage space is the ease and ability to upload and save a finished exported film onto the cloud because of its digital medium.

Further advantages is that digital is clearly ‘future-proof ’ when in comparison with film which it’s colour (alike with 35mm photography) begins after time to fade and become very

washed out. Digital formats in theory shouldn’t change over time.

The advances in technology have lead to the digital not having to rely on any moving parts (unlike film with the tape mechanism). Many higher end digital video cameras are now using SSD’s (solid state drives) which are made up of flash memory as opposed to a moving hand on a hard drive and this means that there is no vibration and the read and write speeds are well above that of any ordinary hard drive where a normal hard drive would write at about 50 megabytes’s per second, a SSD drive has the ability to write at 500 megabytes’s per second. The SSD drives come at a disadvantage however as they are considerably more expensive than tape.

An obvious one is that recently with the major advances, we have had the ability to create Digital Video cameras extremely cheap and can be found on many camcorders now.

Saying this however there are a few advantages that film has over digital and they include the fact that film has the ability at recording at far superior resolutions when in comparison with digital and also the wider dynamic range but I still feel that digital overweighs these but not everyone agrees, certainly not Tarantino.

"Part of the reason I'm

feeling [like retiring] is, I

can't stand all this digital

stuff. This is not what I

signed up for"

Quentin Tarantino

Life of PiA 2012 movie following the story of a ship wrecked young boy. Lead visual effects by Rhythm & Hues Studios.